He opens his eyes and the colors are vibrating too. The red of the stop sign isn't just red-it's pulsing at the edge of his vision, a slow oscillation between scarlet and rust. The green of the trees shivers in the breeze, thousands of leaves each moving at their own tempo, their own pitch. A crow lands on a power line and the wire bounces, a plucked string, and he can almost hear the note it would make if the world had better acoustics.
Everything is frequency. Everything is vibration. The concrete under his feet, the air in his lungs, the blood in his ears. He's standing in a symphony of physics, a universe of standing waves and resonance, and he's never noticed it before because he's always been too busy thinking about what's next, what's wrong, what he needs to fix.
A car horn blares behind him.
Alex blinks. The light is green. The guy in the pickup is gesturing, not angry exactly, just impatient, just human.
"Sorry mate," Alex says, and his voice sounds strange in his own ears, too loud, too present.
He crosses the street. The vibration feeling fades, or he stops paying attention to it, or his brain reasserts its usual filters. By the time he reaches the other side, it feels like a dream already, like something that happened to someone else.
But his thumbs are moving again, a different message this time: